


Your Heart is True

by ListenListen223



Series: Thank You for Being a Friend [1]
Category: The Boys (TV 2019)
Genre: Character Study, Content Notes Inside, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Other, Past Rape/Non-con, S2E6 Spoilers, Sex Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26843608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ListenListen223/pseuds/ListenListen223
Summary: A younger Frenchie turns tricks and begs for scraps and does whatever it takes to watch Golden Girls from 3:00 AM to 5:00 AM.Whatever it takes.
Series: Thank You for Being a Friend [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1961419
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23





	Your Heart is True

**Author's Note:**

> I do not know any definition of "turning tricks" that's not sex work, so here it is. Content notes in the end note.

  
  


The entire operation hinges on shaving his face at five in the evening, with razors from shelter hygiene packs and bodega soap rubbed into a thick lather. Frenchie tests the blade with his thumbnail and carefully drags it down, cutting off the dark thick hairs that sprouted since yesterday. He slices years off his face. 

Frenchie is proud of his ingenuity.

He tried it straight, at first. He certainly knew how to do this long before he escaped Papa and stole his way across the Atlantic. How to survive by any means necessary, and how to survive _these_ means. But the men of New York had little interest in him as he was, dark stubble, a lit cigarette and grin that could eat his tricks alive as they stumbled through asking how much to fuck him, blow him. 

Men stop sooner for the appearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, pale-faced and leaning uncertainly against a brick wall layered with old fliers, looking up quickly, nervously, when they slow down and ask, “You need a ride?” 

Men who ask, “What are you doing out here on your own?” and stroke the soft skin of his cheek and practically burst through their briefs when he shrugs and looks down without answering. Men he does not hesitate to kill. 

Frenchie reasons this is much simpler. It is dance he has known longer, with far more money in the end. 

Serge hopes for a future with different operations that do not hinge on passing for a child walking into a lion’s den. 

He goes days without sleeping, waiting for a trick who takes him home and foolishly falls asleep, allowing him to relieve them of their jewelry, their petty cash. When those come and go, Frenchie buys a night at this favorite motel and invites all of his beloveds to come to be safe. They sleep and smoke until the weed runs out and they cannot sleep any longer. Some days Frenchie only wakes to smoke and to watch his two hours of _Golden Girls_ , and Serge quietly hopes for a life where every day is only smoke and _Golden Girls_. 

He knows that it is different than when Papa was up for weeks, dragging him from room to room and slapping Serge every time his eyes started to droop, until he was a live wire, more awake then Papa ever was. 

This is different, this is survival. This is fun.

One time he agreed to blow a congressman, and the man broke their agreement. Frenchie returned to put a bullet in his head. He lived off the bounty from that night until the news grew bored of covering the “assassination” and Frenchie realized that the piles cash he had made off with had transformed into a handful of MDMA and not much else. So he went back to work. 

It is as easy to transform into a teenager as it is to become a grown man capable of defending himself in a city shelter. On many days Frenchie loses track of which was a bigger lie. 

The shelter is not quite the best, but at times there are no men who want the boy he is pretending to be. Or rather, no men who do not bear the scars Frenchie left them after broken agreements. Frenchie does not let men who break agreements walk away intact, and by his second year in New York, he wonders if there is a single man left who does not hit the gas when they see him on the corner. 

Without agreements, Frenchie may as well be a child. Perhaps this is why the men who want him to be one break them so often. 

Frenchie has a deal with Roland at the Project New Day Men’s Shelter. Roland respects their agreement. He lets Frenchie in every night he wants a place, even when thirty stupider men who were turned away are sleeping across the street. 

Frenchie sucks Roland’s cock when he arrives, and again before he leaves in the morning. 

In return, Serge is allowed to sleep on the couch in the office and watch _Golden Girls_ on the TV resting on top of manilla folders. He sleeps until just before three, when his body wakes up on his own before he is fully sure what is happening, he has turned on the television and already waiting for that plane to fly across the screen and the most important words in his life to be sung. 

“Thank you for being a friend,” Serge whispers along with the theme song, “Traveled down the road and back again, your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant.” He smacks his fist against the couch arm in time with the song. 

Serge smiles when he realizes that this is one of his favorite episodes, the one where a conman, Harry, nearly marries Blanche. It is lovely to imagine a world where a relationship, con, wedding, and the payout would pass in half an hour. 

Serge last saw this episode in February, and he calmed his mind for weeks by imagining he was Blanche, being wooed by Harry. 

Then he imagined that he was Harry, wooing Blanche. Then he imagined he was a student in Dorothy’s class and she was disappointed in how poorly he wrote but tutored him at the house and then she said, “Why don’t you move in here, Serge?”

And then he imagined he was Rose’s best friend and she brought him to Minnesota and everyone loved him. Then he imagined Sophia was so proud of how well he made Madelines. 

During all the imagining, he killed two men, and he did coke while a trick had a meeting with China across the room, and had a girlfriend for a good six weeks. Probably more things, but Serge prefers Florida to New York most days. 

Then it is December. And Serge gets to watch that episode again. His mind races trying to notice everything he missed. He wishes for paper and a pencil to draw the wallpaper in Blanche’s bedroom so he will remember it forever. 

Roland comes in from doing whatever he does when he is not choking Serge on his lopsided dick and grins at the television. Serge decides to trace the pattern of the wallpaper on his arm, and refine it during the last two episodes of the night. 

“My mother likes this,” Roland says, scratching his hairy neck. “I impressed her last time we talked, she was thrilled that I watch her show.”

“You do not watch it,” Frenchie says. He darts a quick look at Roland, standing too close and dangerously near breaking a part of their agreement. “I watch it.” 

Roland sits next to him on the couch heavily and presses his fingers on the back of Serge’s neck, massaging his thumb through his hair. “You’re so beautiful.” 

This is _not_ their agreement. Roland knows he cannot touch him outside of the agreed contract. Serge studies the screen, knowing that he will have to look away very soon. Rose has locked herself in the bathroom because she wasn’t ready to be kissed. Serge imagines he knocks on the door. 

And Rose nervously says, “Who is it?” 

Serge says “It is me, _mon couer_.” 

Rose nervously opens the door an inch and says, “Oh,” so relieved to see Serge. She opens the door just wide enough to allow him through and she hugs him tight and somehow he is much smaller than her for a moment, but she lets go and he is a grown-up once again, wiser than her once again. 

“I’m so scared,” Rose wails, “I don’t want to lose Arnie, but I don’t want him to touch me.” 

Serge knows precisely how to help her. “If you get something out of it, it is no thing to let him have what he wants. Imagine you are in France, anywhere really. Then it’s not like it is happening to you.” 

“You’re so smart,” Rose says, “Once I’m done, let’s go to Saint Olaf. Everyone misses you.” 

“That would be wonderful,” Serge says. 

In the meantime, or perhaps the same time, Frenchie kills Roland with a stapler and the well-placed edge of his own desk piercing his skull. He kicks Roland’s body. “See if you ever do that again, _imbécile_.”

He stays until five, glancing up at Blanche having a tense lunch with her sister about the sister needing a kidney and Blanche not wanting to give it. He would love to be having lunch with Blanche, more than anything at this moment. He pries open a locked desk drawer and files through Roland’s wallet. Frenchie takes his cash--$37, _pathetic_ \--Starbucks gift card and what looks like a family photo. Wife, daughter, and son.

Frenchie decides not to move Roland’s body, in favor of finishing the episode. He smiles when Blanche reveals that she does not have to give her sister her kidney after all.

The Golden Girls never have to do things they do not want to do, in the end.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Content: Frenchie/Serge's true age is ambiguous in this, he presents as an adult and a young teenager doing sex work within a short amount of time. He also refers to numerous sexual assault in terms of "agreements" with Johns being broken, and kills many people. There are minimal descriptions of sexual and non-sexual violence
> 
> *Deep breath*
> 
> Comment pls!


End file.
